If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?

As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.

It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.

I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.

Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.

If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?

I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.